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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Math Videos

How do you feel about the usefulness of videos inside the classroom? I was wondering about this today, and did some research to look up interesting math videos online. Sadly, there really aren't very many math videos out there -- definitely not as readily available as videos for history, English, or science. What a shame!! Seems like we are missing an entire medium of instruction this way. Videos in other classes can evoke emotions, which can then help to trigger a higher level of engagement during the class discussions that follow. I have decided that I would explore this method of teaching a little bit further.

I did manage to find one source: http://www.projectmathematics.com/index.htm , which appears to be promising, at least in terms of its Geometry videos clips. One thing I liked, for instance, was a clip where they showed a fun animation of a shape transforming into another similar shape -- something you just can't visualize quite as well on a whiteboard. I'm going to try to get a hold of this video in order to evaluate it further. The same website also sells another video about the historic applications of math (something that I think is so rich, yet so rarely discussed with kids). I'm very tempted to buy it, but I think I'm going to wait on this. No $40 impulse buys. --Here, that money could buy you 40 beers! :)